He was one of the most capable problem-solvers I had ever coached. Fast, decisive, technically brilliant. And completely exhausted — because the problems never stopped arriving.
When we mapped his week, the pattern was unmistakable. Nearly every hour was reactive. Every day began with yesterday’s crisis. Every plan was interrupted by the next emergency. He had become, in his own words, “the most expensive firefighter in the organisation.”
The Seduction of the Urgent
There is something deeply satisfying about solving a problem that’s right in front of you. It’s concrete. The feedback is immediate. You can see the result of your effort.
Strategic thinking doesn’t offer that. Planning is slower, less visible, and its rewards are deferred. So for leaders who are wired for action — and most effective leaders are — the urgent perpetually displaces the important.
The trap is not laziness. It’s the opposite. It’s a particular kind of high-performing busyness that feels essential and produces, over time, a peculiar kind of exhaustion: the exhaustion of someone who has been working very hard in the wrong direction.
When We Looked at the Fires
In our coaching work, we examined the fires he’d been putting out over the previous quarter. One by one, we asked the same question: was this foreseeable?
Almost all of them were. Not as certainties — but as possibilities that were visible, in outline, weeks or months before they became crises. The supply chain disruption. The team conflict. The stakeholder misalignment. Each had early signals that no one — including him — had prioritised above the current emergency.
“I’ve been solving today’s fires today,” he said quietly. “And you’re telling me I was already late.”
Yes. And more importantly — he already knew it.
Creating the Space to Think Ahead
The shift we worked on was not strategic planning in the formal sense. It was simpler and harder than that: protecting, every week, a window of time that was specifically not for solving today’s problems.
Time to look at the horizon. To ask what was visible in outline. To make small interventions before they became large crises.
Within three months, the fire frequency had measurably reduced. Not because the environment had changed — it hadn’t. But because he had changed his relationship with it.
Coach’s Reflection: Operational excellence is not just about how fast you respond to problems. It is about how many problems you prevent from becoming urgent in the first place. The investment required is not more capacity — it’s a different allocation of the capacity you already have.
Call to Reflection: What is the earliest signal you regularly ignore — and what would change if you didn’t?
Yatish Chandrasekhar is an Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant at The Yogi Compass. He works with senior leaders across industries to help them discover their True North. If this resonated, he’d love to hear from you.